It was odd the way he had kept seeing Emma through those years: seeing her, but never speaking to her. It was as if some god designed that he should not forget. Yet, in a way, he had forgotten. The wound had healed, the anguish had gone, in the end, as he could never have imagined it would. It had never crossed his mind, once the first terrible time was over, to try to see Emma again; and this not because of any sense of duty, but because of a steady failure of inclination, a steady diminishing of appetite. When, at the regular intervals appointed by the god, he had espied her from the top of a bus, glimpsed her, always in the next room, at a picture exhibition, seen her back disappearing into a shop, and once passed her unobserved on an ascending escalator while she descended on the other side, he had felt an extreme but quite momentary sh6ck. He had thought of her as belonging to the past.
For nearly two days now he had known that he would have to talk to Randall about her. What he had seen made it imperative. But it was an unpleasant, even distinctly alarming, prospect and he had put off doing so. Randall had been seventeen at the time of the affair with Emma. He had certainly known a little about it at the time. He had doubtless learnt more since. But the name of Emma had never come up between them, and it was only indirectly that Hugh had learnt, and had tried to forget it at once, that Randall was sometimes to be seen at Emma's house.
What Randall did in London was a mystery to all. In the last few years, and especially since Steve died, he had taken to spending more and more time in London, where he kept a little flat in Chelsea. Ann had increasingly taken over the management of the nursery, so that by now Randall, who even dared to complain about it, seemed more like a privileged lodger than like the master of the house. At some point in this process Randall had given it out that he had decided to become a writer; and shut up in his tower room he had in fact written four plays, none of which Ann or Hugh had been allowed to see. Part of his time in London had doubtless been devoted, unsuccessfully, to getting one of these plays put on. But it had gradually and imperceptibly become fairly evident to Hugh that Randall must have a London mistress. He wondered how evident it was by now to Ann.
During Fanny's illness Randall had spent much more time at home and had behaved in a fairly orderly way, and it had seemed possible to Hugh that the bad patch was now over and that his son might settle down again with his wife and child. Randall's behaviour since their return to Grayhallock had not been exactly reassuring; but it was too early to tell, and what Randall would do next was anybody's guess. Hugh had avoided 'speaking seriously' to his son about his treatment of Ann or indeed about anything else; and he occasionally wondered if this were not, on, his part, a grave failure. He certainly ought to speak to Randall sometime about the drink. That the other things were bad might liberally be thought a matter of opinion, but it was no mere matter of opinion that the drink was bad. These were unpleasant thoughts. And Hugh knew, which was another unpleasant thought, that only the spur of a quite personal and selfish obsession, would ever make him overcome his reluctance to be frank and direct with his boy. Under the pressure of such a spur he now writhed in the direction of a decision.
'And this afternoon perhaps you'd make another search for Hatfield, Ann was saying. She did not like people to be idle. Hatfield, Fanny's cat, had run wild since her death and disappeared into the fields.
'He's gone right away, Hatfield, said Miranda. 'He won't come back ever.
'Yes he will, said Ann. 'Bowshott saw him last week quite close to the house. And the milk I left out got drunk up.
'My hedgehogs drank that milk.
'Anyway you try and find him, and take Penny with you. You're neglecting Penny.
'He wouldn't come back with me, said Miranda. 'He doesn't like me. He's a one-woman cat.
'Well, off you go to change, it's after ten-thirty. Which doll are you taking to church this time? Is Poussette the lucky one?
'That's not Poussette! said Miranda scornfully. 'That's Nanette!
You always mix them up. She uncurled herself and began to make for the door, trailing the doll in one hand.
Half-way there she stopped and turned back to Hugh. 'So sad. I never remembered to ask Granny how that card trick was done, the one where you hit the pack on to the floor and the card you looked at first is left in your hand.
The door banged behind her. Avoiding Ann's eye, Hugh settled down to read Sarah's letter.
Chapter Three
'I W O U LD N' T stand for it a moment if I was your missus!
'Wouldn't you, Nancy? And what would you do about it, would you beat me? Why, I believe you would! Laughter followed.
Pausing on the stairs of the tower, Hugh recognized with distaste Nancy Bowshott's voice issuing from the half-open door of Randall's room. He hated this familiarity with the servants, he hated everybody knowing that all was not well. Ann and Miranda were still preparing for church, and Hugh had nerved himself, before further «reflection should make him once more hesitate, to go to see his son, though he had not decided what he would say to him. The nervous urge to confront Randall had suddenly become strong.
Hugh retired, coughed, and went noisily up the remaining stairs.
He knocked and put his head round the door. Nancy Bowshott, a plump girl with a great deal of chestnut hair and a discontented face, who was credited with having a brute for a husband, hastily put down a glass upon the table. she picked up her dustpan, patted the neat tight handkerchief out of which her mane bulkily emerged at the back of her head, and looking a little red, slid past Hugh with a murmured 'Good morning'. Hugh entered and closed the door behind him.
Looking a little like something by Hogarth, Randall lounged behind his table on which were to be seen a bottle of whisky, two glasses, three bowls of roses, a pile of notebooks, some scribbled sheets of paper, an overflowing ashtray, a banana, a half-eaten biscuit, a pair of secateurs, and an original volume of prints by Redoute which had cost Randall a very large sum of money at Christie's. Without a coat, displaying striped braces, his crumpled collarless shirt open at the neck, he surveyed his father with an air of benign and meditative encouragement, like an Abbot giving audience. The room smelt of alcohol and roses.
'Well, Randall, said Hugh. 'Well, Father, said Randall.
Hugh's relations with his son, uneasy in the latter's childhood, impossible during his adolescence, and embarrassed in the early days of his marriage, had unaccountably improved of late. Hugh was not sure whether this was due simply to an increasing need to replace Sarah, or whether it was not connected in some subterranean way with the deterioration of Randall's relations with his wife. This last suspicion caused Hugh some uneasiness; and there were moments when he detected, in his still shy and reserved dealings with his son, the merest touch of an unpleasant complicity.
'I was just wondering, said Hugh, 'whether I could persuade you to come over to Seton Blaise with the rest of us this evening.
'Well, I don't think you can, said Randall, tilting his chair and till benign. 'I don't like those people and they don't like me, and I don't really see why I should expose myself to their blood disapproval.
'All right, all right, said Hugh. Did they disapprove of Randall? He didn't know. Mildred, with her long tolerance of Humphrey and her skill in defending him, was surely not a censorious woman. Mildred: he thought of her for a moment. Yes, he remembered kissing her, but he could not recall the details, except that it was summer.